Fifty years after his brutal murder, the director’s vision of fascism is more urgent than ever

 

 

"Some deaths are so suggestive that they become emblematic of a subject, the deceiving lens through which an entire life is forever after read. In this weirdly totalitarian mode of interpretation, Virginia Woolf is always walking towards the Ouse, the river in which she drowned herself. Likewise, Pasolini’s entire body of work is coloured by the seeming fact that he was murdered by a rent boy, the crowning act of a relentlessly high-risk life.

But what if this was the intention; the malevolent cunning with which his assassination was designed? What if, rather than the instant martyrdom of a bullet to the head, Pasolini was killed in such a way as to make it seem that he had sought out his own destruction, a rightful punishment, at least in the eyes of conservatives, for the manifest perversions with which his art as well as life were rife?

Furthermore: what if this reputational as well as actual murder was designed to drown out – contaminate, confuse – the warnings he’d been issuing with increasing ferocity in the final years of his short life? “I know” was the central refrain in a famous essay published a year before his death in Il Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading newspaper. What Pasolini knew, and what he refused to remain silent about, was the nature of power and corruption during Italy’s brutal 1970s,"

READ MORE IN THE ESSAY BY OLIVIA LAING 

What did Pasolini know? Fifty years after his brutal murder, the director’s vision of fascism is more urgent than ever | Books | The Guardian